Fact: Requiring every single painting you make to be absolutely perfect is an unrealistic goal. You’re never going to achieve it, so you become too scared to even try. Haven’t you heard about ‘learning from your mistakes’?
Instead of aiming for perfection, strive for every painting to teach you something and risk mucking things up by trying something new just to see what happens. Challenge yourself by tackling new subjects, approaches, or things that are ‘too difficult’.
What’s the worst that can happen? You waste some paint and some time. Sure, it can be frustrating when you don’t achieve something you’d like to do, but as the cliché goes, “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”. Usually I paint out the ‘offending bit’ (see example), leave it overnight, and attack it again in the morning. Sometimes I admit defeat for the moment, and put it aside for much longer. But never permanently; I'm much too stubborn for that!
Ultimately, if you become famous enough, museums will be so delighted to have any work by you that they’ll hang paintings that were unfinished or just rough studies, not just the ones you’d considered finished and good. You’ve seen them – those paintings where part of the canvas is still bare, except for perhaps a line drawing showing what the artist was going to put there.
"Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it." -- Salvador Dali, Surrealist artist
